Thursday, April 3, 2014

"Whether such a new union structure will be based on one, two or three governments; whether the model of union would be Canadian, US, Indian, or akin to the European Community or East African Community or some combination of all or some of these, will depend precisely on the outcomes of the process of a national debate....Meanwhile the debate continues. Will it move from Bunge to Buguruni? That is the question" - Issa G. Shivji's (2006: 102) Let the People Speak: Tanzania Down the Road to Neo-liberalism.

"A demand for a three-government federation, greater autononomy for Zanzibar, reduction in Union matters, from Zanzibar, was a demand for the right to self-determination, a democratic demand. Jumbe may have agitated the demand from Zanzibar but he did not invent it...Nyerere, true to his pragmatic approach, wanted the Union to remain a party affair to be resolved within the chambers of the party in camera under his control. A constitutional case on the matter would have brought it out in the open beyond his and the party's control...One lesson that the Tanganyika-Zanzibar Union clearly teaches is that a durable African Unity cannot be built on the foundation of narrow nationalisms. Another lesson is that unity must be founded on democracy, must be bottom-up rather than statist, top-down" - Issa G. Shivji's (2008: 250-252) Pan-Africanism or Pragmatism? Lessons of Tanganyika-Zanzibar Union.

"In a unitary state, too, government power may be distributed between central and local units or governments. But a unitary state has one supreme law-making authority and the local governments derive their powers from that supreme authority. They are therefore subordinate and not coordinate. This is called devolution of power. In my inaugural lecture (Shivji 1990a), I showed that the constituent instruments of the union between the then Republic of Tanganyika and the People's Republic of Zanzibar are premised on the federal principle as discussed here. The distribution of the legislative and executive power between the union and Zanzibar governments, called union and non-union matters, has been clearly expressed in the Articles of Union and in subsequent constitutional instruments including the current union and Zanzibar constitutions. This exclusive jurisdiction of the union and Zanzibar governments in union and non-union matters in Zanzibar has also been judicially recognized by the court of Appeal in the case of Haji v Nungu (1987). Tanzania's constitution is therefore federal and not unitary. So far I have described the union in constitutional terms. In this chapter, my interest is to place the union question on the level of politics so as to understand the tensions which have informed and continue to inform the union. I proceed to do this next....I also want to suggest that so far as the constitutional experience of Tanzania is concerned, the union question has been the concentrated expression of the problem of democracy. The tension in the union is around the distribution of power between the Zanzibar and union governments and its fate is interlinked with the fortune of democracy in Zanzibar as well as within the union " - Issa G. Shivji's (2009: 79-80) Where is Uhuru? Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa.

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Karibu kwenye ulingo wa kutafakari kuhusu tunapotoka,tulipo,tuendako na namna ambavyo tutafika huko tuendako/Welcome to a platform for reflecting on where we are coming from, where we are, where we are going and how we will get there